Review: ‘Another Day in the Death of America,’ on Guns Killing Children

In 2013, between the wee hours of Nov. 23 and the wee hours of Nov. 24, 10 American children and teenagers were killed by guns. The youngest, Jaiden Dixon, was 9, shot by the deranged father of his eldest brother. The oldest, Kenneth Mills-Tucker, was 19, shot in a car under circumstances that are still unclear.

The number of fatalities that day exceeded the national daily average of 6.75. Then again, averages are almost always misleading — murders of this kind tend to peak on weekends, and Nov. 23 fell on a Saturday that year. The victims, all boys, were also disproportionately African-American (seven). Then again, there’s always been an appalling lopsidedness to this demographic. That day was simply worse.

Those 24 hours, extraordinary in two senses — extra ordinary and beyond ordinary, banal in the context of our national normal but outrageous by any civilized measure — are now the subject of a book by Gary Younge: “Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives.” It is exactingly argued, fluidly written and extremely upsetting. This is your country on guns.

A book like this has potential pitfalls, highhandedness not least among them. But Mr. Younge, a columnist for The Nation and editor at large for The Guardian, makes for a personable, unusual narrator. As a Briton, he brings a fresh perspective to this topic. As a father and a man of Barbadian descent, his interest in it is also personal. “I had skin in the game,” he writes. “Black skin in a game where the odds were stacked against it.”

And he describes frankly the mistakes he made as he was reporting. “I should have texted,” he writes of one parent whom he failed to persuade to speak. “An unexpected call from an unfamiliar number in the middle of the day from someone wanting to talk about your recently murdered son would throw anyone off. I know that now.”

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Gary YoungeCredit
Linda Nylind

Mr. Younge devotes one chapter to each child. No two were alike, and neither were their murders.

The 18-year-old Tyshon Anderson, shot in the head in a stairwell, had a reputation for terrible violence. The 16-year-old Samuel Brightmon, who took a random bullet as he was walking home with a classmate, was a fragile “homebody.” The 18-year-old Gary Anderson made the mistake of wearing a red hoodie — his killer was looking for another guy in a red hoodie — and the 16-year-old Edwin Rajo was an impulsive child, probably with undiagnosed attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Make out like you’re gonna shoot me,” he told his friend Camilla — and, unfortunately, she did, not realizing that the gun they’d recently purchased was loaded.

And then there was Jaiden Dixon, the 9-year-old, who had the misfortune of opening the door when his brother’s father came by in a gale of rage. What can you say about a 9-year-old? That he was sweet. That he liked playing Battleship. That he knew the movie “Cars” by heart.

But Mr. Younge cautions against distinctions between “innocent” victims and those who made bad choices. “The argument’s center of gravity shifts from ‘This shouldn’t happen to anyone’ to ‘This shouldn’t happen to people like this,’” he writes. Dividing these kids into two lanes, the sinners and the righteous, implies that those who led imperfect lives weren’t victims of other forces.

Such as the National Rifle Association. Mr. Younge’s reporting from Indianapolis, where the N.R.A. held its 2014 convention, and where one of the victims of Nov. 23 happened to live, is especially memorable. He describes Wayne LaPierre, the organization’s chief executive, telling a huge rally: “We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and carjackers and knockout gamers and rapers.” It’s a vision of America, Mr. Younge realizes, that stipulates that our very culture is under siege. Sound familiar?

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The N.R.A. is by no means Mr. Younge’s sole culprit. He blames class immobility. (A quotation from The Washington Post: “Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong.”) He singles out parents who leave guns unlocked and unattended in their homes. (Tyler Dunn, an 11-year-old who died in rural Michigan that day, was killed by a friend whose dad had left a Remington shotgun in his kid’s bedroom.) He cites the tactical legislative disenfranchisement of black neighborhoods, mass incarceration and the decline of industry. (His book is anti-travelogue, taking us through South Chicago, South Dallas, Newark — all rusted husks of themselves.)

What is perhaps most disheartening and eye-opening about Mr. Younge’s book is the fatalism he discovers in the communities most affected by gun violence. “There is a learned hopelessness around this,” Dr. Doriane Miller, a Chicago physician, tells Mr. Younge. Her words are nothing compared with the words of Tyshon Anderson’s godmother. “It was sad to see him laying there,” she says. “But I’m just glad it’s over.”

Tolerating the pain of loss was better than tolerating the chronic fear of it. As if being born black and poor in her neighborhood were the same as being born with Stage IV cancer.

An unpredictable corollary to this despair: Black parents, Mr. Younge writes, are so demoralized that they dwell on personal responsibility rather than on economic and racial inequality (the usual white-liberal reflex). Because racism and poverty are as enduring as the seasons, parents and activists “concentrate, instead, on what they feel they have some control over.”

This finding genuinely surprises and discourages Mr. Younge. “In virtually every case,” he writes, “on the day on which this book is set, the deaths prompted no broader question about the role of guns, let alone engagement with the issue.”

Many of the kids in his book, maybe most of them, made bad decisions at some juncture. Mr. Younge acknowledges that. But making bad decisions is also what kids do, especially in adolescence. The difference is that some children are lucky enough to make mistakes in an environment that simply nudges them back on course. “That does not make you a better person,” Mr. Younge writes. “It simply makes you better equipped to be safe in a country where guns are in plentiful supply.”

Mr. Younge comes from a country that provides far more protections for the less fortunate. It may be the most valuable aspect of his sensibility: He recognizes that luck, by definition, is just that. It is not something you earn.